Unique Content Becoming More Important for Affiliates

With many murmerings over the past few weeks about potential Google algorithm changes to attempt to combat some of the spam and scraper sites in the SERPs, Matt Cutts has announced that a change has indeed been implemented. While no one is naive enough to think this will cure the web of spam (impossible), it does mean that we should be looking at this as a bit of a wake up call that the time of posting crappy, low quality, rewritten or duplicated material and expecting great results is slowly coming to an end.

There’s no way Google and other search engines will ever be able to make every search result perfect, but they ARE indeed now focusing on duplicate content in a way that perhaps they haven’t in the past. I recall a past video from Google stating that they don’t penalize duplicate content… I didn’t believe it back then to an extent, and at least we now know it’s one of their priorities.

“The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content.”
Read his entire post here.

I’ve no idea how that would work for all the aggregrate news sites out there who republish many of their articles from the big news companies like Reuters, but for affiliates and niche marketers it should be enough of an incentive to increase the quality of your content and most of all, make it as unique as possible.

This post I read the other day on the wonderful UK Affiliate Marketing Blog by Kirsty, summed it up well: “be better than your merchant” – check out her post here (some interesting comments there too if you have the time).

I’m not expecting to notice any changes in my traffic or rankings based on this update but over time I think we’ll see more of these algorithm changes taking place as Google tries to “clean up” their search results to get rid of low quality junk sites.